The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[Paddy™]

We've often heard in interviews that SOMA will feature quite a number of encounters with other human characters. Do you think those characters will be met in person by the player, i.e. true animated NPCs, or will all communication happen again over radio/closed doors as in all their previous games?

I could imagine them having some new forms of communication, e.g. video chat, where they could use material from the Depth movie. But I very much doubt we'll get alive animated NPCs. It'd probably be too much work to get right and the engine would need to be updated too, I guess.

I think you might be right; all of the media we've seen so far only shows us animated enemies and dead humans. In the GameTrailers preview video, we see the character talking with Catherine Chun (I think), but Catherine is only represented by a static photo on a terminal screen. I'd assume fully-animated, speaking NPCs would have been shown to us by now if they were part of the game.

If I remember correctly, one of the reasons why Agrippa's lower jaw was missing in TDD was to avoid having to animate his face for speech. In SOMA, I think FG found another way around the problem by keeping the NPCs separated from the player by communication terminals. I think it's a good thing; the fewer opportunities there are for the illusion to be shattered through hammy animation, the better our overall experience will be.

I like your idea of using live action video for the communications. I'd be interested to see how something like that would come across.